An integrated development environment (IDE) gives a computer application developer an environment wherein the appropriate tools needed for source code editing, compiling, linking, testing, debugging, and profiling are seamlessly integrated. The advantage of using an integrated development environment is that the computer application developer need not be concerned about the tool interfaces when moving from one phase of code development to the other.
Some IDE's, such as Eclipse™ available under the Common Public License from the Eclipse Foundation, Inc., have built-in functionality, but most of that functionality is very generic. Additional tools are necessary to extend the platform to work with new computer application types, to do new things with existing computer application types, and to focus the generic functionality on something specific. Eclipse is built on a mechanism for integrating and running modules called plug-ins.
An application runtime program (also called runtime program or just runtime) is a software component designed to support the execution of computer programs written in some computer language. The runtime program contains implementations of basic low-level commands and may also implement higher-level commands and may support type checking, debugging, and even code generation and optimization.
A runtime program relieves programmers from the burden of writing code for mundane tasks such as drawing text on the screen or making an Internet connection. It also provides an abstraction layer that hides the complexity or variations in the services offered by the operating system.